cbondurant

a cartoonishly cynical way of viewing human interaction.

Why do I play chess, despite the fact that robots have practically solved it? Why do I make crafts despite the fact that I could purchase stuff of the same quality, if not higher, for the same cost of materials and no cost to my time? Why do I practice piano?

Why do I watch youtube videos about hobby machine shop work despite not having a metal lathe or mill? Why do I watch channels like applied science, or usagi electric, or PBS space time, when I have no interest in becoming a material scientist, working with 50 year old computers, or becoming a theoretical physicist or astronomer?

It's because its personally enjoyable to me! Human beings are naturally curious creatures! We naturally want to share with and learn from others!!

Of course, the solution described here is not a perfect one, (as perfect solutions don't really exist when it comes to messy human things like international politics) but it at least follows from an easy to identify set of principles on how ambiguous situations like these should be handled.

Then you look at the current day with the "Gulf of America" which fails to be primary, common, or local, and just get disappointed.

I'd be interested to see how this compares to the same scaling procedure, but by population. Essentially seeing what the IPv4-per-capita is.

The very first three "egregious examples" are already leaving me with a low expectation for the rest of this article.

"aquire" over "acquire" I will readily agree with, that makes a lot of sense. "suficient" and "comunal" however? absolutely not. those doubled consonants are putting in legitimate work in indicating an alternative stress pattern. its suf-FI-cient and com-MU-nal. but without the doubled letters, my intuitive reading becomes su-fi-CI-ent and CO-mu-nal.

There's plenty of words that could stand a respelling in english, but those are terrible examples to call "egregious". doubled consonates have a clear function in the words they appear in.

I think it says quite a bit that I had already been thinking of Outside In before it was even mentioned in this article. Outside In truly is one of the great works of math communication.

I'd argue that its format, a dialog between a novice who is yet still sharp (is able to be the one that makes the connections between ideas) and an expert who guides with pointed questions (fills in background context that is needed for the problem at hand), is one of the most effective ways of formatting mathematical communication. Surreal Numbers by Donald Knuth is another great example of the style I'm referring to.

I was hoping to see if by "21st-Century" it meant "music theory that is applicable to the way modern music is generally written and interacted with". With details on things like microtonal music, increased focus on rhythmic theory, an increased appreciation for the role that timbre plays in the sound of music, the theoretical frameworks that underpin long standing musical traditions of other cultures and contrasting what makes each musical theory unique as a way of better understanding both western theories of music as well as the breadth of musical expression....

Nope! Just the same old, well beaten, rotting corpse of a horse in the form of a musical theory that entirely exists to prop up schenkerian analysis. The one that that racist, elitist music programs have been teaching since well before the 21st-Century. (The way you can tell is because it includes figured bass, which is totally irrelevant to any discussion that isn't about the harmonic style of 18th century european musicians.)

God forbid I want to, oh I don't know, make music that's similar to the kind that I actually listen to on a regular basis? Better understand its underpinnings and what makes it work in the ways that it does? No. Figured bass.

I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.

I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.

The self-modifying executable that can modify itself on disk is kinda horrifying to me. In that kind of "ok yes, you have proven you can, but I really think you shouldn't" kind of way.

Incredibly impressive on a conceptual level though. If someone proposed doing this while having the executable only grab a read-only reference to itself, I think that would be a legitimately solid idea.

I think I can tell just how good a design this is by the fact that the moment I interacted with the demo it just felt right. To the extent that I had to focus harder to really recognize that it was doing exactly as described.

Truly, good design is design that goes unnoticed.

Had to reread this a few times to properly parse what the hypothetical was.

My first read was "if you could redo your life from age 17 what would you do". To which "figure out how to make an LLM" would be an insane answer.

I think his advice here is maybe... a year or two too late to be good advice. I can't foresee the job market for machine learning experts being better than it is now in 5-6 years time when said hypothetical 17 year old would be most ready to start career hunting. Either the bubble is gonna pop and the market will be flooded with laid off AI talent.

Even if I'm wrong about there being a bubble at all, I still think that in 5 years time the tech will just have matured to the point of diminishing returns on refining existing architectures. Plateauing until some PHD comes up with something as ground breaking as attention.

I feel like (as is usual with nontechnical reporting on cutting edge science) this article isn't doing a great job at communicating the underlying tech well here. Had to independently look up some descriptions of what super absorption is, and what actually makes it a quantum effect.

Sounds like the idea is, if you've got a bunch of light emitters spaced far closer to each other than the wavelength of light they are emitting, the light output becomes quadratic on the number of emitters. as opposed to linear on the number of emitters in the standard case. And the reverse becomes true as well.

Based on that, I'm pessimistic on the potential of this, as it sounds like charging requires a conversion from electricity to light, and then discharging would also be a conversion from light back to electricity, and we don't exactly have the most lossless processes for that conversion.

Maybe useful in certain kinds of optics or laser work though, where directly dumping the stored energy as light would be desired?

My gut instinct was that operations like sin, cos, tan, etc, were the kind that would get aggressively inlined by any modern compiler, and then after inlining the redundant conversions between radian/turns would be canceled out by optimization passes.

Of course, gut instinct can be wrong, so I checked in godbolt and was surprised to find out that even if I try to force lto, it still doesn't get inlined and remains a call.

I can only hope that the hard github dependency can be chalked up to just "this was the easiest way to get this out the door". Its not a good solution in the long term, (single point of failure, github is increasingly unreliable and disliked, what about people already on a different forge or repository source) but it does solve at least a few problems that would otherwise be thorny (minimum bar for submission, outsourcing identity and spam management to github, etc.)

And since the bar for validation is expressly stated to be rather weak, I guess this would be best conceptualized as a specialized search engine that can weed out the <80th percentile of mediocre formalized proofs, with a target audience of professional mathematicians who have the ability to make determinations on the final 20% themselves.

Maybe also something I'd wanna skim over at some point, as a non-mathmatician who just thinks lean is neat. Its not useful to me but its fun to learn about.

I think 14 exists as a test case for having a larger search space that needs to be efficiently ignored. Its not difficult solution wise, but if it is particularly slow that means you're doing a bad job at pruning potential steps. Making sure you're doing good early pruning of the empty chambers.

While impressive that the optimal can be proven, I feel like the example puzzles here aren't ones that are particularly hard to find solutions for (when move count doesnt matter). I'd be interested to see at least one example that has a lot of tricky dead states that would act as traps.

> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.

Oh! If you want that, you should run your own model and set the generation temperature to 0 :) Because that's not what any commercial LLM is doing. Never has been. This is just making up a universe that doesn't exist so you can get mad about no longer being in the universe that doesn't exist.

The masking technique of using a subset of the statistical distribution for each next token isn't going to be meaningfully distinguishable from a natural language perspective. I honestly think its a very elegant way to implement watermarking. I've got no real opinions on how effective it will be to people actively trying to defeat it, but I suspect that the people who are trying to pretend that LLM text was something they wrote themselves are probably too lazy to put in the work to try and defeat it anyway.

my immediate first thought is that I've never heard of the consecutive constraint before, or that if I have I have forgotten about it. I've only ever heard of a uniqueness constraint, that no number can be used twice, which still achieves the same goal of preventing filling every cell with exactly one number.

Then again, I do mostly remember this in terms of the yet unsolved magic-square-of-squares problem, not the standard magic square.

ironic, given the title, that I can't read this article on my main desktop, because cloudflare's bot detection has had me as a false positive for years now. I'm just forever stuck on the cloudflare captcha.

No space for this human here, I guess.

Edit after reading through this on a seperate device that hasn't been banned from most of cloudflare: I think this guy is vastly underestimating the amount of humans that are still in the production loop of almost every supply chain.

Consider the humble through-hole LED. A product that surely has reached near the absolute peak of production line optimization, being an almost purely fungible product who's form factor will never change. They are still manually put together by humans. A sheet of semiconductor diodes is separated with a manually operated machine for human access. the prongs are placed into a jig by hand, so that a semi-automated machine can place each diode onto the correct leg. Then the jig is placed, again by hand, into position for the injection molded plastic dome.

It's not just one long automated pipeline that has a couple of hoppers for raw materials at one end and finished LEDs at the other. real human beings are still involved at every step of the process. If we can't achieve end-to-end automation for something as dead simple as the humble through-hole LED, after almost 50 years of process improvement? Technology will never fully remove the human from the economy.

I feel like a lot of documentation falls into this kind of style, where the motivation behind design is not communicated, just the design itself. Sometimes it's because the documentation writer doesn't want to leak internal details to the end user (closed source libraries are an especially bad source of this). Sometimes it's that the writer is too close to the project, and is struck by the curse of knowledge (can't properly identify which details are actually self-evident, and which are only obvious because they already know them).

Another example of why technical writing is difficult, I think.

The trash heap event gave me the same relic the first 3 times in a row that I got it before it gave me anything else. I wonder that's another example of this correlation?

I hope the StS team is made aware of this and is able to make the earlier outcomes a bit more evenly spread, so that the distribution matches more closely with what people would intuit them to be.

A reason I suspect (though, truly it is only a guess) is as a way to force people to spend money. Something akin to "either buy something or leave" to try and capture just that tiny bit of additional revenue.

My context is that I was born in the late 90s: The main thing that lead to me prioritizing using the computer and playing with people online over in person was one of convenience. My parents did a really good job at making it a massive pain in the ass as a young teen to have a friend visit, or vice versa.

"Hey can I go visit X?"/"Can X come play?" "what time? did you already call to ask if it was ok? What did their parents say? Who's going to drive you, their parents or me? how long? Our house is too messy for visitors."

Very quickly I got sick of having to play 20 questions. It was far easier to just add my friends on skype, spin up hamachi, and host minecraft servers for us to play together online. No exhausting negotiation sessions with my parents, no worry that the scheduling won't work out, I just get to play.

Definitely not a universal experience, in that regard. But I think its definitely a component of it. Why bother trying to fight for the permission to be independent out in the world, when you could be digitally independent far more easily?

I remember being young when "kids don't play in the yard anymore, they just play on their phone/consoles/computer" started to be a big talking point. Even then I recognized that the reason I was on the computer so much was, at least in part, because it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house, or to convince my parents to let a friend come over.

And I consider myself relatively lucky in that part of the US where I live, despite being in a relatively rural region, is remarkably walkable. As opposed to most places in the US, which are effectively micro islands when it comes to getting anywhere on foot.

Then lets also add on how loitering is treated as such a great offense. That traditional areas for young adults to just "hang" (cafe, bowling alley, arcade) have increasingly priced them out. That a teenager hanging out on their own is often suspected to be "up to something"

In a time before the cell phone, we apparently let kids wander unsupervised more than we do in an era where they can get a hold of their parents at almost any time? It's ludicrous.

I already use Rust and don't have experience with Go, so this article maybe isn't super for me.

I do have one nitpick though: Stating that data races are "caught at compile time" in Rust feels like it is overstating the case, at least a little. It sounds a bit like its implying Rust can also handle things like mutual lock starvation, or other concurrency issues. When that's simply not the case. I know "data race" is technically a formal term, with a decently narrow scope, yet I still think it could be a bit clearer about it.

I like the idea mentioned of a source code escrow, and it feels like that would be a great place for national governments to step in. It reminds me of how the British Library requires that any published book have a copy sent to them for archival. Why not have similar laws in place for source code? If for no other reason than pure archival.

I wouldn't mind at all if it was all just purely kept in a metaphorical locked vault, only to be opened after some special conditions regarding the support and lifespan of the software were met. Even if those terms were like, "only after the original copyright has expired", aka 70+ years, it would still be so much better for the state of preservation of source code over the current norms. We have games that have had their original source code lost in under a decade from their publication. (Kingdom Hearts 1) Any alternative is better than the current state of things.

What an interesting article that definitely isn't pulling incredibly obvious red scare tactics. I'd be quite interested to know what damn article it was that was apparently so out of touch with reality that it left this author reeling in shock and horror.

Perhaps they neglected to mention what Wikipedia article it was, because they knew that if people were able to visit the page, look through its edit history, and inspect the content of its talk page, they would be able to come to their own conclusion that the author's claims are overstated, sensationalist fearmongering? In a time where the US federal government is trying its hardest to undermine the freedoms of its own people, I find any accusations of foreign actors to be laughable.

You know its funny, I think I'm less worried about people on the other side of the planet stealing my personal data and trying to influence the way I think than I am about the people in the same country as me. Since, you know, not only would it be easier for them to, since we are in the same country, but also they stand to gain a lot more from it as well!

Personally, I don't think I have much benefit in a new generation TI-84. I still own a TI-85, a model that was discontinued before I was born, and it is still an objectively superior tool for doing small calculations than any other alternative.

For instance, we compare the phone calculator. My phone fills a lot of really important roles besides being a calculator, ones that necessitate a password. So first I have to unlock my phone. Then I have to leave whatever app I had open before. Then I need to find the damn calculator app.

That's 5-6 seconds of friction, depending on how responsive my phone feels like being and how many times I fatfinger my password because the concept of "muscle memory" on a touch screen is practically an oxymoron. Not to mention, you cant just walk away from the desk for a moment with the calculator app left open on your phone, ready to come back at a moments notice, like you can with a dedicated calculator. Phones are just too important for that.

There's arguable pros and cons to using your PC over a calculator, but I think that discussion is a lot more nuanced. Either way, a PC is definitely less portable than your phone or a calculator.

Maybe I'll be convinced to upgrade at whatever point they add usb-c and a rechargeable battery to their lowest trim model. Not before that though.

So if I've got the right idea, the clearances harder to achieve for a fan vs a lego piece because you're not just concerned with the static tolerances of the shape of the fan, but also the dynamic forces that will make the blades flex and bend under load.

Clearance in this case is how far away the blades have to be at rest, such that the dynamic forces the blades experience under load won't flex them outwards to the point they scrape against the enclosure. Which I'd assume has far more to do with material properties than it does the raw geometry of the blade.

Now I wish I had a high-speed camera to be able to inspect the dynamic deformation of a noctua fan. I'm curious about how rigidly they behave under load.

Another part of the issue, as I can see it, is that paying your workers better is a prisoners dilemma:

If nobody pays their workers well: All companies suffer from a disaffected, burnt out workforce that is unable to consistently perform at the best of their ability. As well as many industries suffering from the fact that their products are non-essential. If you're paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by rent, you're not going to bother buying a new board game, pick up a book, get the latest and greatest console, or its overpriced games.

If some pay their workers well, and others don't, the companies that do will be at a disadvantage financially against their competitors. A healthier and happier employee almost certainly directly results in higher profits, but not to an extent that matches or outpaces the increase in wages required to reach that point.

If all of them pay their workers well, workers become less financially stressed. They do their job better, because they are healthier, less exhausted, etc. This also results in the exact opposite of the first case above: People have more money, they can spend more, you make more profit from people spending more across the board.

This is part of the reason that minimum wage laws are actually really important, and why the fact they have stagnated for so long is such an issue. It breaks the prisoners dilemma game by mandating that everyone together makes the group-optimal decision over the individual-optimal one.

Or, you know, we could also try UBI! Or help free up discretionary spending power by nationalizing the most essential goods and services (targeting the ones that are the least elastic). It's not like we aren't lacking in options that would work to alleviate the issue here.

Based on the origins of Rust as a tool for writing the really thorny, defensive parsers of potentially actively hostile code for firefox, I have to imagine that another web browser is the most at-home place the language could ever be.